Boy you got that right. Can't believe some of the stuff I see in this forum. A giant smoking hole in the ground but damn the guy was perfect in his radiotelephoney right til impact. Whew!
Circumstances sometimes roll the dice in your favour, sometimes not, procedures/rules are written in blood it is oft said. The Herc crew certainly did a an absolutely great job, no denying. Having already declared a PAN there is little doubt the controller knew what Swissair 111 meant when they used the word "Emergency".
1:14:18.0 Swissair one eleven heavy is declaring Pan Pan Pan. We have uh smoke in the cockpit, uh request (deviate), immediate return uh to a convenient place, I guess uh Boston ***
1:25:05.4 And we are declaring emergency now Swissair one eleven
1:25:49.3 End of recording
All 229 died.
The link I previously gave was an outcome of the Avianca 52 crash at JFK, a 707 in which eight of the nine crew members (including all three flight crew members) and 65 of the 149 passengers on board were killed. The NTSB determined that the crash occurred due to the flight crew failing to properly declare a fuel emergency, failure to use an airline operational control dispatch system, inadequate traffic flow management by the FAA, and the lack of standardized understandable terminology for pilots and controllers for minimum and emergency fuel states. The crew had asked for "Priority" which didn't really communicate the predicament they were in.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...ts/AAR9104.pdf
"Screaming holy **** I had a midair would also get everyone’s attention."
Yes, but it doesn't tell anyone the state you're in, just knocked the nav light off, wing came off your F-15 and managed to land OK, or you're ejecting. Should you need to eject just say "I'm ejecting", don't bother with all that MAYDAY nonsense.
I guess we could adopt the attitude of the apocryphal story of a FJ type putting out a MAYDAY in Vietnam and being told in reply "Shut up and die like a man".
not to mention what it's going to cost to cleanup that strawberry field
Carrots a local says in one report, so should lower the cost.